Sea Lion Proves Humans Are Not the Only Mammals Who Can Boogie

Having rhythm has long been thought to be a human trait only, but a new study from the University of California, Santa Cruz, proves that we're not the only mammals who know how to boogie.

A sea lion named Ronan has been trained to bob her head in time with rhythmic sounds. According to a UCSC press release, Ronan is also able to move to the sounds of music she has never heard before. She listens, quickly catches the beat, and starts to bob her head accordingly.

Peter Cook, who works in the Department of Psychology at UCSC and helped train Ronan, said, "When we first trained Ronan, we used a simple repeating sound, something like a metronome." Cook explained that once Ronan had learned how to identify a simple beat, without any further training she was able to find and keep the beat in complex stimuli, including music.